Thursday, May 13, 2010

Pepper Potts & Tony Stark in the original Iron Man

Because one of my kids owns the DVD, we prepped for Iron Man 2by rewatching the original Iron Man last week. Big mistake. Numero 2 of the projected trilogy is but a shadow of the first film, which wasn’t any Macbeth or Godfather to start with. This is the case for two reasons. The first is narrative. The most interesting part of Iron Man lay not in the CGI or battle scenes, which were by-the-book fare at best, but in the development of the characters, particularly in the sexual tension between playboy-billionaire-turned-superhero Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) & his personal assistant Pepper Potts, played by & Gwyneth Paltrow, and also in Stark’s relationship with his best bud, James Rhodes¹, & even the primary bad guy, Obadiah Stane, played by Jeff Bridges. There is a presumption in the first film that we need to draw these characters out, and that’s at least half of its charm, given the quality of the character actors filling key roles. With the franchise established, director Jon Favreau (whose previous motion pictures were Elf & Zarutha: A Space Adventure) seems to feel that we already “get” the characters & can just cut to the chase, which is mostly what this film does, save for two subplots, one about Stark’s father, the other about his blood toxicity. The result is far thinner fare. The two other subplots, one about Pepper’s ascendancy to the CEO spot at Stark industries, the other about the presence of Natalie Rushman / Natasha Romanov (played by Scarlett Johansson) in the Stark inner circle are handled badly to the degree that they are handled at all. Paltrow, central as she is to the plot, has very little to do in Iron Man 2 except look great & scream a lot.

The second reason is a consequence of the first – not having to reintroduce or further develop the characters means not addressing the 800-pound gorilla in this film, the replacement of Terrence Howard as James Rhodes with Don Cheadle. Cheadle is a fine actor, but you never see – not once, not for a second – the softness & caring that is the essence of Rhodey’s intimacy with Tony Stark, something that was evident throughout the original Iron Man. There are conflicting stories as to why the switch – Howard was a difficult actor & got paid more than anyone else in the original film², more than Downey even – but the investment is evident onscreen. Howard’s a bargain at any price. This film is fundamentally unfair to Cheadle, simply because it makes a good actor look mediocre.

Not that this will impact worldwide sales any. There is a cynicism to this project that suggests that the producers did not feel much need to do it very well just because they have some terrific character actors in all the leading roles (save maybe for Sam Rockwell as Justin Hammer), and even in some minor ones (Samuel L. Jackson, Jr., mails in his one scene as Nick Fury, making me wish they’d gotten Laurence Fishburne). Just fill it out with special effects & heavy metal music & take it to the bank. Getting the director of Elf to helm the project is just one index of how Marvel cut costs wherever it was felt they weren’t necessary. Like direction.

On the plus side, the roller coaster ride is mostly effective & these are some marvelous actors who have no reason not to chew on the drapery here, and for the most part do so with gusto. Johansson is surprisingly good in this respect. Mickey Rourke’s rogue Russian physicist is terrifyingly made up to look like Mickey Rourke. And I loved one tiny touch, likely missed by anybody not in the computer industry: when Stark arrives to open Stark Expo (a world’s fair of high tech weaponry, complete with Ferris wheel), one of the wannabes who rush forward to try & touch him is Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle & an industry exec known for his Tony Stark-like lifestyle, “as himself.” It’s a more knowing cameo than Larry King’s cadaverous presence or Christiane Amanpour’s one badly directed scene.

There is a trend these days to go with counter-intuitive casting in action-thriller flicks. Downey, Toby Maguire, Johnny Depp & Matt Damon all make unlikely action figures, Daniel Craig only a little less so. Robert Downey, Jr. as Sherlock Holmes is another case in point – who would ever have thought that this slightly built poster child for never giving up on drug rehab no matter how many times you have to trywould become the Errol Flynn / Johnny Weissmuller of our time? On the other hand, imagine just how bad the Iron Man films would be, say, with Nicholas Cage. Downey is one of the great acting talents of our time and cartoon projects are ultimately a waste of his considerable skills, save for the quiet moments, which in this film involve Stark dealing with his father issues & the nasty problem that his artificial heart (no accident that his sidekick A.I. system is named Jarvis) is not so slowly poisoning his system. Stark carries a blood toxicity monitor that will come as a sudden rush of reality to any diabetic who wears a monitor for tracking glucose. It’s an odd touch, but Downey’s interactions with the monitor are among the very best parts of this motion picture. As one of my kids phrased it, Tony Stark is a lot more interesting than Iron Man.

¹ James Rhodes, nicknamed Dusty, was a major league baseball player with the New York Giants in the years just before Marvel came up with Iron Man. Primarily used as a pinch-hitter for Monte Irvin, he was a cult figure and, with Willie Mays, a superhero & household name because of his role in defeating the Cleveland Indians in the 1954 World Series.

² Apparently because he was the first one to sign on, before the producers redid the budget to bring the project in at a lower cost, partly by focusing on actors like Downey & Paltrow rebuilding their careers & willing to work for less. That Paltrow, who took time off to have children, is having to “rebuild” her career tells you way too much about what’s wrong with the film industry.

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

As my homies Ange Mlinko & Pattie McCarthy can both attest, there is not much more to the Paoli Library than a large room at the back of an ill-designed (but with an “historic” façade) bank. In the 15 years I’ve lived here, the bank name has gone from Core States to Meridian to First Union to Wachovia to Wells Fargo – I may even have forgotten one or two – as one institution has swallowed another in the ongoing quest to become Too Big to Fail. The library has continued on as though nothing has happened. The stand-alone PCs that crowded the center of the room when I first moved here in 1995 have web access now, but that literally is about it.

In the sallyport off the parking lot, which enables the library to be open on Sundays when the bank is not, the Friends of the Library have stocked a couple of small bookcases with either books withdrawn from the collection or donated paperbacks. Seeing among the latter an Elmore Leonard novel available for the grand sum of 25¢, I picked up Mr. Paradise& brought it home. It then sat on my fiction/memoir-to-be-read bookcase for a year or three before I picked it up in the wake of reading Herta Müller.

“What is that?” Colin asked when he saw me reading. “That doesn’t look like the sort of thing you’d usually read.” This, I replied, is an amuse-bouche, tho what I really meant was a palette cleanser, which is how I described it when Colin followed my response to his first question with another What’s that?

Elmore Leonard, I explained, used to write great crime novels about Detroit, notable for his unmatched ear for dialog. Then he got famous, got rich, got to Florida, had movies with the likes of John Travolta, George Clooney & Jennifer Lopez in them, got sober (good for him), and I’d long ago concluded that the hard edges had all been rubbed smooth & soft by the ravages of time. Now – now being a relative term since Mr. Paradise first came out in 2002, the same year that Frank Sherlock & CAConrad penned The City Real & Imagined, also the year I began this blog – he has returned in his fiction, this book at least, back to Detroit. I wanted something to serve as a break between Müller & whatever comes next, and Mr. Paradise looks like it would be just the trick. [You can read the first chapter here and samples of other sections at Google Books.]

Which it is, sorta. There’s no question about the hard edges having gone soft & squishy, but Leonard still has an ear – something, say, that Robert B. Parker never had, and likewise what separates someone on the order of Stephen King from hacks like John Grisham, Dan Brown or Michael Crichton. Reading Mr. Paradise is more like eating a rich dessert than an amuse-bouche, but functionally it let me get all the echoes of Müller’s prose (as translated by Michael Hoffman) out of my system, leaving no residue of its own.

Leonard adheres to the rules of the genre, but with his own special sauce, which is that everybody in the book tends to be a loser. Imagine, to use Parker’s Spenser for Hire series as a point of contrast, the affable but earnest bungler Spenser without the inscrutably lethal sidekick of Hawk & the presence of his lady friend the shrink. Delsa, the homicide cop at the heart of Mr. Paradise is not so different from Spenser, a little less of a wise-ass perhaps. But around him a dozen or so important characters waltz through Leonard’s motions, not one of whom is better than they ought to be, so to speak.

The plot, roughly, is this. The title character, who is dead pretty quick here, is an old criminal defense lawyer now in his dotage, waited on by a couple of former clients & whose one pleasure in life would appear to be a $950-an-hour call girl who has taken him on as her exclusive client for $5K a week. When Mr. P gets popped, and his lady friend Chloe along with him, wearing naught but her University of Michigan cheerleader’s skirt, Delsa steps in to solve the crime, and in the process finds himself becoming personally involved with Chloe’s roommate, a model by the name of Kelly whom one of Mr. P’s staffers tries to rope into a scheme of claiming Chloe’s “inheritance.” There are a pair of middle-aged hit men, some young gang bangers involved in a drug hit (one victim was cut up post-mortem with a chain saw & the book has a running gag – both senses of that word – about the number of parts involved), and both of Mr. P’s staffers have their roles to play, plus some additional cops & robbers, plus Mr. P’s daughter who ought to wear the sign “Plot Device” around her neck. In the end, the supposed bad guys are all caught, the supposed good ones safe & sound, somebody makes out very well on an inheritance, tho not whom you might expect nor what you might imagine, & Delsa can shower with Kelly to his heart’s content.

The problem of loserhood is a critical one for Leonard, because it’s what differentiates the periods of his work. In the early Detroit novels – I’ve never read the cowboy novels that began his career – there is a grittiness to it that comes across as very believable. In the Hollywood & Florida-based works, someone is often not a loser, and these works come across much as treatments for possible screen plays (which more than a few ended up as). Returning to Detroit seems at least like an attempt on Leonard’s part to get back in touch with that original grit that made his writing so different from others in his genre. But now, however, everyone – everyone – is a lovable loser, even the lethal bad guys. The hit men don’t like killing people – they’re not sociopaths – but it’s a good living. The guy who is orchestrating everything, the ultimate baddie, is almost as conflicted as the “innocent” model trapped in the middle of the plot. She spends less time lusting after her savior the cop than she does trying to decide whether or not to steal the inheritance all for herself. Nor is Delsa, with his serious boundary issues, sleeping with a suspect, any less compromised. The only character in the book who is presented entirely in negative terms is the wife of one of the hit men. But otherwise, this is a book written entirely in shades of grey.

Leonard was himself 78 when Mr. Paradise came out, pretty much the same age bracket as the dear departed title character, and the softer tone of his more recent work is not unlike, say, the more casual lyricism Robert Creeley took on in his 70s. The two writers make for some interesting comparisons – both were born in the mid-1920s and did their best work around the age of 50 – Creeley’s Pieces, Leonard’s Unknown Man No. 89 & maybe 52 Pickup – and one might argue that both found writing to be a most comfortable habit toward the end, pushing no envelopes whatsoever. I’ve always felt that Creeley was in no way obligated to keep pushing (and that Mabel & Presences suggested the limits of that approach in any event) – that Creeley had worked for decades to clear the ground for the writing he needed & wanted to do, and having found such ground had less need to head off once again into the wilderness. With Leonard, I find myself far less forgiving, and I wonder why. Is it that for him that ground wasn’t in his best work per se, but in the work that reaped the greatest rewards? That sort of just goes with the territory for genre fictioneers, no? Why hold Leonard to a different standard? Plus, one of his most successful works – twice made into a motion picture, once with Glenn Ford & Van Heflin, once with Russell Crowe & Christian Bale, 3:10 to Yuma was one of his earliest short stories.

I think it may be that I once had some sense, possibly foolish, that Leonard was shooting for the most honest of crime fiction and that led to dispassionately examining the character’s lives & their flaws & their language. Now I see a novelist who knows how to hit all the requisite spots in the form, but seems to have lost interest in the world it invokes.

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Ron Silliman was born in Pasco, Washington, although his parents stayed there just long enough for his mother to learn that one could step on field mice while walking barefoot through the snow to the outhouse, and for his father to walk away from a plane crash while smuggling alcohol into a dry county. Silliman has written and edited over 30 books, most recently Revelator from BookThug, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 14 languages. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize,from the Poetry Foundation. His sculpture Poetry (Bury Neon) is permanently on display in the transit center of Bury, Lancashire, and he has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley, although he now lives in Chester County, PA. In 2015, Silliman is teaching at Haverford College & theUniversity of Pennsylvania.